Gratitude, pride at Pan Am Museum's Operation Babylift reunion

On April 4, 1975, a few weeks before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, Thuy Williams’ mother climbed the steps of an airplane and handed Thuy off to begin what she hoped would be a trip to a safe future for her child. The daughter of an American marine and Vietnamese mother was slated to fly to the United States on a C5-A cargo plane.

“That plane crashed. My mom thought that I died,” Williams said nearly 50 years later. “She didn’t know that plane was full. They took me off that plane, and I left the next day.”

Williams, at age 4, became one of hundreds of children flown out of Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — as part of Operation Babylift in the last days of the Vietnam War.

After the military plane crashed, hundreds of children departed aboard two Pan Am 747s with crews who volunteered for this mission. They traveled in bassinets and boxes out of a war zone to settle in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France and Germany.

“They smuggled me out in Operation Babylift,” said Williams, 51. “Operation Babylift was meant to be for orphans. I was not an orphan. There’s a much bigger picture than most people know.”

Williams spoke to Newsday as she prepared to board a flight for an Operation Babylift reunion on Long Island on April 24 to mark the 47th anniversary of the evacuation of children during the last days of the Vietnam War. 

In three weeks in 1975, about 3,000 babies and children were evacuated, including more than 300 to San Francisco on a flight greeted by President Gerald Ford and first lady Betty Ford; the second arrived in Seattle carrying more than 400 children.

“There’s a phrase, ‘children of war,’ ‘orphans of war.’ It should not be in any dictionary but a historical dictionary,” said Lana Noone, of Garden City whose daughter Jennifer arrived in the United States as part of Operation Babylift. “The kids were in harm’s way.”

Honoring history

Like America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the evacuation of children from the war zone was controversial — years later some would view it as America’s attempt to assuage guilt over the war; others said that not all the children had been orphans.

Nevertheless, in April 1975, as conditions had worsened in Vietnam, Ford authorized the evacuation of thousands of “at risk” children, many of whom were living in orphanages or were the children of U.S. service members and Vietnamese women.

In the decades following the evacuation, many have also come to view the children's evacuations as a forgotten episode in U.S. history.

“Everybody knows about Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam War, but they don’t know what happened to the babies and the children that came out of there,” said Carol Mason, a 47-year-old Elkton, Maryland, resident who at 5 1/2 months flew in Operation Babylift. “It should be in all the history books.”

Linda Freire, chair of the Pan Am Museum Foundation, which hosted the reunion at its Pan Am Museum in the Cradle of Aviation, believes Americans’ desire to put the Vietnam War behind them resulted in “this incredible humanitarian evacuation being forgotten or ignored.”

To most of the children, adoptive parents and organizers, Operation Babylift was the culmination of humanitarian efforts to rescue children from a war zone. Indeed, evacuating children from Vietnam had begun piecemeal even before Ford’s “babylift.”

“Throughout Pan Am’s operations over the years, we were carrying orphans to the United States,” said Al Topping, who was then the airline’s director of South Vietnam and Cambodia. “They were escorted by volunteer escorts, but not in big numbers.”

Among them was Dan Marquardt, now 51, who was a passenger on a regular Pan Am Flight in 1974. “I was left on the street by the gate to the orphanage,” the West Babylon resident told Newsday. “The orphanage was trying to get kids adopted.”

The child of an American serviceman in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam from February 1969 to February 1970 and a Vietnamese woman, he arrived in the United States on Jan. 6, 1974, before the official Operation Babylift flights.

“I was fortunate to be out of there before that madness,” said Marquardt, who was adopted by a Rockville Centre family.

He grew up as the eldest of six children and the only adopted child in the family. Marquardt is now working on a documentary about his and others’ lives and evacuation in the last days of the Vietnam War.

Pan Am volunteers

As it became clear Saigon would fall, President Ford in April of 1975 approved $2 million for Operation Babylift.

Topping said the Vietnamese government waived paperwork just before Saigon fell to expedite the evacuation of children. The first military charter, a C-5A cargo plane, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 138 of those onboard, including 78 children. After that calamity, the U.S. government reached out to Pan Am.

“Pan Am pilots and flight attendants didn’t have to take that flight,” Topping said. “They volunteered to come in. Thank God they did.”

Hundreds of Pan Am employees — from flight attendants to pilots to ground crews and escorts — made Operation Babylift possible.

Because it wasn’t clear until later whether the plane that crashed on April 4 “was shot down or sabotaged,” the airline took additional precautions. (It would later be learned that a malfunctioning door caused the crash.)

One Pan Am 747 chartered by Americares, a global nonprofit focusing on poverty, disaster and crisis, and one by Holt International, an adoption agency, arrived in Saigon 24 hours after the crash.

Explained Topping, “As the first airplane began to take off, the second was coming in.”

“Twenty-four hours later, we loaded over 600 babies on two Pan Am 747s,” Topping said. “Most were being carried up there. They were not even old enough to walk.”

Ingrid Templeton, a flight attendant for Pan Am from 1967 to 1986 who volunteered for Operation Babylift, remembered the April 5 flight.

“I picked up the kids from the buses and carried them up to the airplane,” Templeton, a Danville, California, resident, said at the Pan Am Museum’s reunion. “The flight was loaded with crying babies. Two or three kids in one seat. Some of them were really scared. All the older kids were helpful. They calmed each other down.”

She worked on one flight, chartered by Holt International, from Saigon to Guam before another crew took over to complete the flight to Seattle.

“We changed diapers and baby bottles,” Templeton said. “Older kids were reading the younger ones stories. You picked up a baby and then another. It was nonstop.” 

“When we landed in Guam, we were so attached to those children, I didn’t want to get off,” Templeton said. “I wanted to continue the journey. It was hard to leave them.”

Thuy recalled having sat in that plane. “I remember soldiers walking around and the ladies walking around,” Thuy said. “I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what was happening.”

Arriving in America

Planes landed in San Francisco and Seattle, carrying children to a new life and adoption thousands of miles from Vietnam. Thuy was adopted by David and Jenny Williams in Portland, Oregon, a couple who had two children, Michelle and Becky.

“My adoptive parents picked me up at the airport. They brought in a translator later and explained things,” Thuy said. “It took a while to understand all this.”

Carol Mason, the adoptee who grew up in Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, looks at Operation Babylift as a new beginning for her. “The country was at war,” she said. “They tried to get as many children from the hospital orphanages to the United States for a better life.”

At age 3 she became a U.S. citizen. Later, her parents told her she was adopted. “They explained to me how I came over,” she said.

She had believed her father was an American soldier until about five years ago, when she had a DNA test. “I found out I was Vietnamese, a little bit of Chinese and Thai, so I’m a mix,” Mason said. “But no American.”

She had been left in a maternity hospital according to documents indicating she had a fairly common Vietnamese name. “I don’t know if my mother’s name was made up,” Mason continued. “With many adoptees, their birth names and parents’ names could have been made up.”

Many of the adoptees described a second journey later in life as they began searching for birthparents.

Marquardt, a divorced father of 24-year-old daughter, Dyani Marie, through DNA found his biological father in August 2020. He was living in Gold River, California.

“He didn’t know about my existence,” said Marquardt, who added he is still searching for his mother. “I haven’t met my dad yet, but we talk every week.”

Thuy said that through DNA she has located her father, a marine from Hannibal, Missouri. “I haven’t met him,” she said, “but I met two of my half-sisters.”

With the help of a friend who is a U.S. and Vietnamese citizen, Thuy said she found her mother’s address in documents. In 2000, Thuy traveled to Ho Chi Minh City to meet her mother.

“She had been grieving me, because she thought I was dead,” Thuy said. “When I found her, she lived in a tin hut with no running water. I helped her purchase a house.”

Corporate pride

At the Operation Babylift reunion on April 24, around 65 former Pan Am employees gathered with family members, about 20 adoptees, one adoptive parent and Pan Am “aficionados.”

Speeches and ceremonies were livestreamed on Facebook to accommodate attendees from afar.

Ed Trippe, the son of Pan Am co-founder Juan Trippe, said he sees the reunion as a way for Pan Am employees to look back on history. “It was Pan Am aircraft that did it, but Pan Am people made it happen,” he said at the reunion. “They’re proud of their role.”

Mason said Pan Am employees gave her and others a second chance. “They’re heroes, because of their efforts that day,” she said.

The journey the evacuated children began in Operation Babylift, she said, isn’t over. “We’re trying to live life the best we can,” Mason said at the reunion. “We’re still searching for answers.”

Thuy believes those who conducted Operation Babylift “saved so many lives … at the peril of their own” and is grateful to those who “did what needed to be done and weren’t afraid to step up.”

Taking it all in nearly 50 years later, Topping said of the reunion: “It was very emotional for me. They were babies. Now they’re here tonight sharing their story, and they’re all grown up.”